1. United States
2. Maine
3. Letter

Restore the *Not One More* report A congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans has been removed from the Department of Justice’s website. It was taken down to comply with an executive order against DEI more than 300 days ago. The senators who worked to pass the law are furious. The Report was an outcome of the *Not Invisible Act of 2020.* That legislation was intended to help tribes combat the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people as well as to educate the general public about the crisis. The act was signed into law by President Trump in his first term. Like taking extreme measures to block snap and make children hungry, taking down the report is an act of cruelty, depriving Native and indigenous communities of support to combat a tragic crisis. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, (Nevada) who introduced the act, sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. She said she was outraged to see that the report had been deleted from the federal forum. “It is astounding that an administration that actually signed these bills into law, that wants to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals, including our tribal communities, thinks that this isn’t an important issue." The deletion was perpetrated amid a large scale purge of federal websites that the Trump administration regarded as DEI-related. Both Cortez Masto and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska; chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee) said they had contacted the administration to inquire about restoring the Not One More Report. Oklahoma Watch reports that the commission www a major project; it included tribal leaders, human trafficking survivors, relatives of victims, and federal partners. The report was compiled from more than 250 testimonies from tribal members about how the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people has affected their lives. It included recommendations on how to alleviate the crisis, such as having the U.S. Marshals Service help tribal law enforcement address the MMIP crisis. On Feb. 3, more than a dozen tribal leadership and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the administration and several high-ranking lawmakers who work on tribal affairs to ask them to preserve tribal members’ legal status as a *political class* rather than a "suspect racial class". They asked that tribal nations be exempt from DEI-related crackdowns. Less than a week later, Cortez Masto’s office noticed the Not One More Report was no longer available on the DOJ’s website. Why remove a congressionally mandated report? Why turn a blind eye to a crisis that needs attention? Why let this anti DEI notion hinder the efforts to improve the safety of women with tribal affiliations? Why does this reactionary opposition to DEI trump addressing a crisis? This is cruel and harmful and reveals hostility and malevolence.